Outreach

We like to interact with schools, colleges, business and the public.

  • School visits

    Would you like to arrange a school visit? Academics from our broad range of subjects can deliver lectures or workshops at your school or college.

  • Webinar series

    'New and Established Voices in the Study of Language' is our current series of free online talks. Each session will feature two short talks aimed primarily at students in their final years of school, such as Year 10 to 13 students in the UK.

  • YouTube channel

    Missed any of the talks in our seminar series or want to watch them again? Recordings from current and past seminar series are available on our YouTube channel.

  • Corpus for schools

    Corpus resources for A-level English Language teachers and EFL/ESL teachers. The aim of the project is to bring corpora and corpus methods into classrooms.

Free Online Courses

We run free online courses in partnership with FutureLearn. These are sometimes referred to as 'MOOCs', or massive open online courses. You can register online to join any of the courses listed below - you just need access to a computer, tablet or mobile phone to learn with us. Courses re-run at regular intervals.

  • Corpus linguistics: method, analysis, interpretation

    Developed by one of the top academics in the field of corpus linguistics, Professor Tony McEnery, this MOOC offers practical introduction to the methodology of corpus linguistics for researchers in social sciences and humanities.

  • Dyslexia and language teaching

    This MOOC is aimed at English language teachers, teachers of modern foreign languages, teacher trainers, educators and trainee teachers who are interested in how they can accommodate and cater for the needs of students with dyslexia in foreign/second language classes.

  • Language & Style

    You could describe Language & Style as an early MOOC. It is a web-based online course developed by Professor Mick Short, covering all three major literary genres (poetry, prose and drama), and also other text-types, such as advertisements.

  • Shakespeare’s Language: Revealing Meanings and Exploring Myths

    On this free online course, you will explore both Shakespeare’s language and the language of his time. You will be introduced to a range of computer-assisted methods, and you will see how words and meanings pattern across plays, characters, and more. We will explore a few myths about Shakespeare’s language along the way. The course is aimed at anyone with an interest in Shakespeare or language!

Podcasts

  • En Claire

    En clair is a podcast about forensic linguistics, literary detection, and language mysteries from past to present.

  • Words and Actions

    Words and Actions is a podcast about how language matters in business, politics and beyond.

Projects

  • Impoliteness: Using and Understanding the Language of Offence

    This website focuses on language that is generally considered anti-social, and is labelled by a wide-range of terms such as impolite, rude, inconsiderate, verbally abusive, etc. It aims at describing that language and explaining how it works.

  • Edwardian Postcard Project

    Forget about Snapchat, WhatsApp and Facebook, for the Edwardians it was all about the picture postcard! The Edwardian Postcard Project has made freely available a database of 1000 cards, their transcriptions and some historical data.